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Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

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Online maps for the homeless

May 18 2009
The Los Angeles Homeless Map conveys the situation on the streets to all those who are concerned with homelessness A customised mapping firm in the United States has launched an online map of services and centres for rough sleepers in Los Angeles. Although few statistics are available in the region, the company who created the map, Cartifact, said that LA city centre has the US's largest homeless population, but their plight is seldom acknowledged. Cartifact said that the basic principle behind the website is that before a problem can be solved, it must be understood. "The purpose of the downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map is to visually tell the story of downtown's homeless population," a spokesperson said. "These maps exist to convey the situation on the streets to City leaders, the Police Department and all those who are concerned with homelessness in our city." In 2006, the Los Angeles Police Department began taking counts of the number of people sleeping rough in the city every fortnight to try and build information on the situation. Officers canvass each block within its boundaries and make a count of men, women and children, and various kinds of shelters. A log is made of the address and the number present in each category. The map was created in parallel to these measures and is intended to complement the work of the LAPD. It aims to study whether the numbers of homeless people in LA are going up or down, and whether measures introduced to the city have a positive or negative affect. "Cartifact takes the raw data from Central Division and pulls it into its GIS system," explained the spokesperson. "The system geocodes each address to produce coordinates for the address and the plotted points are then placed onto a map of downtown Los Angeles and styled to better convey the information." Although the finished map is provided back to the LAPD in order to serve its needs, it is also - most interestingly - available online for public access. Colours are used to show density levels so that new visitors can see which centres are busy and which areas already house a large number of service users. Over time the map demonstrates how densities have changed. There are no current plans to take this mapping into other areas.
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